[WikiEN-l] defining Free Encyclopedia

Sun Aug 22 20:19:30 UTC 2004

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 11:51:22 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
*Snip*
> 
> >  Should it be free for commercial redistribution?
> 
> Yes.
> 
*Snip*

Well, for anyone to commercially redistribute wikipedia, they would have to go through and remove all of the non-GNU copyrighted material. They could rely on the current community created labeling scheme to remove any labeled free-use images, but there is always the off chance of an image that wasn't labeled properly would stay in. This means that to commercially redistribute wikipedia, someone would have to look through every image, and make sure they are not copyrighted. Now, maybe this is desirable to some wikipedians, to make it harder for someone to profit off of our work. However, I personally think that it would benefit our cause for us to have commercial distributions of our work; it would help spread the word of our cause. In any case, I think it would be beneficial for us to come up with a better system for including non-GNU copyrighted material. We never know who in the future is going to want to use our content, and it is going to be much easier to separate the non-GNU material out now than 10 years from now.

-- 
Michael Becker